What is a website launch checklist?

It's the structured list of everything that has to be true before a new website goes live - strategy, content, technical SEO, performance, accessibility, QA, analytics, legal compliance, and the launch-day cutover itself. It exists so the things that quietly break a launch (a leftover noindex, a dead form, a missing privacy policy) get caught on staging instead of by your first visitors.

How is launching a new site different from migrating one?

A migration moves an existing site - the dominant risk is losing rankings and traffic through missed redirects. A new launch has no existing equity to protect; the risk is shipping something that's slow, broken, untracked, or non-compliant, and never getting indexed in the first place. Different failure modes, different checklist. If you're moving an existing site, use the migration checklist instead.

What's the most common reason a website launch goes wrong?

A staging 'noindex' tag or 'Disallow: /' in robots.txt left in place after go-live. The site looks perfect, gets announced, and is invisible to search engines for weeks because nobody checked the live URL. The second most common: a contact or signup form that silently fails, so leads vanish with no error.

Should I write content before or after the design?

Before. Design built around real copy works; design built around placeholder text breaks the moment real words arrive - sections are the wrong length and hierarchy collapses. Copy is the structure of the page, not the filling.

What should I check on launch day specifically?

That the live site has no staging noindex or robots block, SSL is valid and HTTPS is enforced, the canonical host is settled (www vs apex), the homepage and key pages render, every form actually delivers, analytics fires, and the sitemap is submitted with indexing requested for top pages. Smoke-test the real conversion path on the production URL within minutes of going live.

Do I really need a privacy policy and imprint at launch?

Yes. A privacy policy that accurately reflects what you collect is required wherever you have visitors subject to GDPR or similar laws. In Germany and much of the EU an imprint (Impressum) is legally mandatory and actively enforced. These need to be live before the site is, not added later.

How do I get a new site indexed by Google quickly?

Verify the site in Google Search Console, submit the XML sitemap, and use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your homepage and most important pages. Make sure nothing is blocking crawling first. With this, indexing typically takes days rather than weeks.

What performance targets should a new site hit at launch?

Core Web Vitals in the 'good' range on every key template: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 - measured on a mid-range phone on a real network, not a flagship on office wifi.

Should I do a hard launch or a soft launch?

A soft launch (quietly live, no announcement) lets you catch real-world bugs with low-stakes traffic before the big push. A hard launch concentrates attention but punishes any defect publicly. Most teams should soft-launch for a few days, fix what real traffic surfaces, then announce.

What do I do after the site is live?

Monitor analytics, Search Console, and error tracking daily for at least two weeks; fix crawl errors and 404s fast; collect real user feedback through recordings or a survey; and schedule the first data-driven iteration. A launch is a v1 - the teams that win treat it as the start of an optimization loop, not the finish line.

/resourceswebsite-launch-checklist

Website launch checklist. 55 steps.

A website launch checklist is the plan that gets a brand-new site live, fast, findable, compliant, and built to convert - instead of slow, broken, or invisible to Google. 55 steps across 9 phases, tool-agnostic, built for real SaaS sites.

By Margus VeeberUpdated May 2026~11 min read

Steps

Phases

Roles

Phases at a glance

01Foundation & strategy
02Design & content
03Build & technical SEO
04Performance & accessibility
05QA & cross-browser
06Analytics & tracking
07Legal & compliance
08Launch day
09Post-launch

TL;DR

The five things that actually matter

01A website launch without a checklist is how a brand-new site ships slow, broken, untracked, or invisible to Google.
02The single most common launch disaster is a staging noindex or robots Disallow left live - check it on the real URL.
03Write the copy before the design. Design built around placeholder text breaks the moment real words arrive.
04If analytics and conversion events aren't live before launch, you permanently lose your best baseline.
05Privacy policy and (in the EU) an imprint must be live before the site is, not added the week after.

Progress

0/55(0%)

Filter by phase

Filter by role

Phase 01

Foundation & strategy

Decide what the site is for and how you'll know it worked - before anyone designs a pixel.

0/6

01
Define the one job this site has to do
FounderMarketer
Before anything else, name the single most important action a visitor should take - book a demo, buy, subscribe, contact. A site that tries to do everything converts on nothing. Every later decision gets measured against this one job.
02
Identify the primary audience and the action you want from them
FounderMarketer
Write down who this is for in one sentence and what you want them to do. If you can't, the copy and IA will drift. Vague audience equals vague site equals weak conversion.
03
Choose 3-5 success metrics and how you'll measure them
MarketerFounder
Decide what 'this launch worked' means in numbers - signups, demo requests, revenue, qualified traffic - and confirm each one is actually trackable before launch. Metrics chosen after launch are excuses, not targets.
04
Map the information architecture and URL structure first
SEOMarketer
Sketch every page, its purpose, and its URL before design starts. Clean, shallow, logical URLs are easier to rank, link, and maintain. Restructuring a site after build is expensive and SEO-risky.
05
Lock the tech stack, hosting, and domain - and register the domain early
DeveloperFounder
Pick the stack and host deliberately, and secure the exact domain (plus obvious variants) well ahead of launch. DNS propagation, SSL issuance, and email setup all take longer than you expect on launch week.
06
Plan the content: every page's purpose, owner, and deadline
MarketerFounder
Content is the work that always runs late. List each page, who writes it, and when it's due. A built site with placeholder copy is not launched - it's just expensive.

Phase 02

Design & content

Copy first, mobile-first, accessible by default. The site is the message, not the decoration.

0/8

07
Write the copy before the design, not after
MarketerDesigner
Design that wraps real words works. Design that wraps lorem ipsum collapses the moment real copy arrives - sections are the wrong length, headlines don't fit, hierarchy breaks. Copy is the structure.
08
Design mobile-first - most visitors are on a phone
DesignerDeveloper
More than half of web traffic is mobile, often much more. Design the small screen first and scale up; the reverse always produces a cramped, compromised mobile experience where most of your audience actually is.
09
Establish a consistent design system
Designer
Lock a type scale, spacing scale, color tokens, and a reusable component set. Inconsistency reads as amateurish and quietly erodes trust on a brand-new site that has no track record to lean on.
10
Make the primary CTA unmissable on every key page
DesignerMarketer
One clear, repeated, visually dominant call to action tied to the site's one job. Competing CTAs of equal weight split attention and tank conversion. Ambiguity is the enemy of action.
11
Design for accessibility from the first screen
DesignerDeveloper
Sufficient contrast, visible focus states, real heading hierarchy, and tap targets sized for thumbs. Retrofitting accessibility after launch costs far more than designing it in - and excludes real customers in the meantime.
12
Prepare and compress all imagery in modern formats
DesignerDeveloper
Export at the sizes actually used, in WebP or AVIF, with sane compression. Unoptimized hero images are the single most common reason a new site feels slow on launch day.
13
Proofread every word - twice, by two people
MarketerFounder
A typo on a new homepage does outsized damage: there's no reputation yet to absorb it. Spelling, grammar, product names, prices, and legal entity names all get a fresh-eyes pass before launch.
14
Create a custom 404 page that helps people recover
DesignerDeveloper
Broken links happen from day one - mistyped URLs, old social posts, bad references. A 404 with navigation and a search or home link recovers the visitor instead of losing them to a dead end.

Phase 03

Build & technical SEO

Semantic markup, metadata, schema, sitemap - the plumbing that lets you get found.

0/12

15
Use semantic, well-structured HTML
Developer
Real headings, landmarks, lists, and buttons - not div soup. Semantics drive accessibility, SEO, and how AI engines parse your content. It's nearly free at build time and expensive to retrofit.
16
Unique, descriptive title tag and meta description on every page
SEOMarketer
These are your search and social snippet. Duplicate or missing titles waste your strongest on-page ranking signal and produce ugly, low-CTR results the day you get indexed.
17
Exactly one H1 per page with a logical heading hierarchy
SEODeveloper
One H1 stating the page topic, then H2/H3 in order with no skipped levels. This is both an accessibility requirement and a primary structure signal for search and AI engines.
18
Self-referencing canonical tag on every page
DeveloperSEO
Tells search engines the definitive URL and pre-empts duplicate-content problems from tracking params, trailing slashes, or www vs apex. Cheap insurance against a whole category of indexing bugs.
19
Generate and publish an XML sitemap
DeveloperSEO
Lists every indexable URL so search engines discover the new site fast instead of waiting to stumble onto it. Exclude non-canonical and noindex pages so you don't send mixed signals.
20
Configure robots.txt deliberately - and point it at the sitemap
DeveloperSEO
Allow what should be crawled, disallow admin and noise, reference the sitemap. A wrong rule here can hide the entire site from search or expose pages you didn't mean to.
21
Remove every staging noindex and Disallow before launch
DeveloperSEO
The single most common launch disaster: a 'noindex' meta tag or 'Disallow: /' left over from staging. The site goes live, nobody checks, and it never gets indexed. Verify on the live URL on launch day.
22
Add Open Graph and Twitter card metadata to every page
DeveloperMarketer
Controls how links look when shared on LinkedIn, X, Slack, iMessage. Launch announcements get shared heavily on day one - a missing or broken preview wastes your highest-attention moment.
23
Implement structured data (Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, plus page types)
DeveloperSEO
JSON-LD helps search and AI engines understand and attribute your content and unlocks rich results. At minimum Organization and WebSite site-wide, BreadcrumbList in nav, and Article/Product/FAQ where they apply.
24
Add FAQPage schema to pages with a real FAQ section
DeveloperSEO
Marks up question-answer pairs for rich results and gives AI engines a clean, citable source. A visible accordion alone isn't the signal - the schema is. Only mark up FAQs that genuinely exist on the page.
25
Ship clean, lowercase, descriptive URLs
SEODeveloper
Short, readable, lowercase, hyphenated, no query-string junk for primary pages. URLs are forever once you have backlinks - get them right before launch, not after they've been shared.
26
Configure favicon, app icons, and web manifest
DeveloperDesigner
The favicon and home-screen icons are the smallest, most-seen brand asset you have. Missing or default icons make a brand-new site look unfinished in the exact tab the visitor keeps open.

Before you launch

This checklist gets your site live, fast, and findable. It doesn't tell you whether the site is actually built to convert. The Web Growth Audit is a conversion-focused playbook for SaaS sites - run it before launch so you ship a site that earns, not just one that loads.

See the Audit

Phase 04

Performance & accessibility

Fast on a mid-range phone, usable by everyone, Core Web Vitals green.

0/6

27
Pass Core Web Vitals on every key template
Developer
LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1, tested on homepage, a landing page, and a content page. Failing CWV is both a ranking factor and a direct conversion tax from the first visitor onward.
28
Optimize image delivery: responsive sizes, lazy-load below the fold
Developer
Serve appropriately sized images per breakpoint and defer offscreen ones. Image weight is almost always the biggest performance lever on a fresh marketing site - and the easiest one to get wrong.
29
Nail the font loading strategy
Developer
Use font-display: swap or optional, self-host or subset, and preload the critical face. Bad font loading causes invisible text or a jarring reflow on the first paint every visitor sees.
30
Minimize and defer third-party scripts
Developer
Chat widgets, analytics, A/B tools, embeds - each one is someone else's performance budget spent on your site. Load them async/deferred and audit whether each truly needs to be there at launch.
31
Accessibility pass: keyboard, alt text, ARIA, contrast (WCAG AA)
DeveloperDesigner
Run Lighthouse and axe, then keyboard-test the real conversion flows. Accessibility is a legal requirement in many markets, a sizeable share of your audience, and better semantics rank better too.
32
Test on real mid-range phones on a real network
DeveloperDesigner
Emulators and flagship phones on office wifi lie. A real mid-range Android on 4G is where you discover the layout shift, the tap that does nothing, and the three-second hero image.

Phase 05

QA & cross-browser

Every link, every form, every breakpoint, every browser - caught on staging, not by users.

0/5

33
Click every link and CTA - zero broken links at launch
DeveloperMarketer
Run a link checker against staging and spot-check by hand. A 404 on a brand-new site, with no goodwill banked, reads as 'this isn't finished' and the visitor leaves.
34
Test every form end-to-end and confirm submissions land
DeveloperMarketer
Submit each form for real and verify the lead, email, or record actually arrives in the destination tool. A silently broken contact or signup form on launch day means leads vanish with no error and no trace.
35
QA across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge - and iOS Safari
DeveloperDesigner
Rendering bugs that never appear in Chrome are real, and iOS Safari is the biggest offender. Test the key templates in each before launch, not after a customer screenshots the broken one.
36
Test responsive layouts at every key breakpoint
DeveloperDesigner
320px, 390px, 768px, 1280px, 1440px. Watch nav collapse, image scaling, and text overflow. Most layout bugs live between the breakpoints you designed for.
37
Final content review on staging: facts, prices, links, legal names
FounderMarketer
A last read-through on the real staging build, by someone who didn't write it. Wrong pricing, a stale claim, or the wrong legal entity name on launch day is the kind of error that's costly to walk back.

Phase 06

Analytics & tracking

If you can't measure the launch, you can't tell whether it worked.

0/5

38
Install analytics and verify it fires on every page
DeveloperMarketer
GA4, Plausible, Fathom, Matomo - whatever you use, confirm a real test visit shows up in real-time before launch. Launching blind means you can't tell whether day one worked or where visitors fall off.
39
Verify the site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
SEOMarketer
Verify ownership and submit the sitemap so you can watch indexing, coverage, and crawl errors from day one. Search Console is your only window into how search engines actually see the new site.
40
Define and test conversion events and goals
MarketerDeveloper
Form submits, signups, purchases, key clicks - configured and verified firing before launch. Conversion data you start collecting on day one is worth far more than data you backfill after realizing it was never set up.
41
Wire the cookie consent banner before any tracking fires
DeveloperMarketer
Consent must gate analytics, pixels, and marketing tags - and load before them. Get the order wrong and you either break tracking or break compliance, both on the most-watched day the site will ever have.
42
Set up uptime and error monitoring with alerts
Developer
Uptime checks plus client and server error tracking (Sentry or similar), wired to a channel you actually watch. The point of launch monitoring is to hear about an outage from a robot, not from a customer.

Phase 07

Legal & compliance

0/4

43
Publish a privacy policy that matches what you actually collect
FounderMarketer
It must reflect the real analytics, forms, pixels, and processors in use - not a generic template. An inaccurate privacy policy is worse than none: it's a documented compliance gap from launch day.
44
Publish an imprint / legal notice where it's required
Founder
In Germany and much of the EU, an Impressum with legal entity, address, and contact is legally mandatory and actively enforced. Missing it is a fast, avoidable fine - have it live before the site is.
45
Publish terms of service / terms of use where relevant
Founder
Anything transactional - signup, purchase, account - needs terms that define the agreement and limit liability. Cheaper and calmer to write before launch than to draft mid-dispute.
46
Confirm consent actually suppresses analytics and pixels
DeveloperFounder
Test in incognito on the live URL: declining consent must genuinely stop analytics and ad tags from firing, and the choice must persist. A consent banner that doesn't enforce the choice is theatre, and a liability.

Phase 08

Launch day

The cutover. Ordered, reversible, smoke-tested, monitored.

0/4

47
Lower DNS TTL 24 hours ahead, then point DNS and go live
Developer
A low TTL (around 300s) the day before means a fast rollback if something breaks at cutover. Raise it back once the launch is stable. This single step turns a scary irreversible flip into a reversible one.
48
Confirm SSL is valid, HTTPS enforced, and www↔apex canonicalized
Developer
Valid certificate with auto-renewal, all HTTP redirected to HTTPS, and one canonical host (www or apex, not both serving). Browsers block invalid HTTPS outright, and split hosts split your SEO and analytics.
49
Smoke-test the live site: homepage, key pages, forms, payment
DeveloperMarketer
Production behaves differently from staging - different env vars, DNS, CDN, secrets. Walk the real conversion path on the live URL within minutes of going live, including a real form submit and, if you sell, a real test transaction.
50
Submit the sitemap and request indexing for key pages
SEO
Submit the sitemap in Search Console and use URL Inspection to request indexing for the homepage and top pages. This is the difference between getting found in days versus weeks.

Phase 09

Post-launch

A launch is a v1. The first two weeks decide whether it becomes a v2.

0/5

51
Monitor analytics, Search Console, and errors daily for two weeks
MarketerDeveloper
The first two weeks surface everything QA missed - a dead form, a broken flow on one browser, an indexing block. Daily checks turn a silent two-week leak into a same-day fix.
52
Watch for crawl errors and 404s, and fix them fast
SEODeveloper
Check the Search Console coverage report through the first weeks. Early 404s and crawl errors are cheap to fix now and compound into lost rankings if left to sit.
53
Gather real user feedback and session recordings
MarketerDesigner
Heatmaps, session replays, or a short survey reveal where real visitors get confused - which is never exactly where you predicted. A launch is your first contact with real behavior; instrument it.
54
Announce the launch where your audience actually is
MarketerFounder
A site with no visitors can't tell you whether it works. Coordinate the announcement - email list, the right communities, social, partners - so launch day produces enough traffic to learn from.
55
Plan the first iteration - a launch is a v1, not a finish line
FounderMarketer
Schedule the first review with real data on the calendar before launch buzz fades. The teams that win treat launch as the start of the optimization loop, not the end of the project.

Compare

Hard launch vs soft launch vs phased rollout

The checklist is the same. How loudly you flip the switch is a separate decision - and it changes how much a defect costs.

Approach	What it is	Risk profile	When to use it
Hard launch	Go live and announce on the same day, all at once	Any defect is public and high-stakes	Best when you have a real audience and high confidence
Soft launch	Quietly live for days, no announcement, then the push	Low - real traffic surfaces bugs before the spotlight	The safe default for most new sites
Phased rollout	Ship section by section, or to a traffic percentage	Lowest, but slowest, and needs infra to support it	Best for large sites or risky platform changes

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Ten questions I get every time someone's shipping a new site.

Launching soon, or live but the numbers look quiet?

This checklist gets the site live and findable. The Web Growth Auditis a conversion-focused playbook for SaaS websites - run it before launch so you ship a site built to convert, or after launch if the traffic showed up but the signups didn't. Delivered in Notion and Figma in two weeks.

See the Web Growth Audit Talk to Margus

This website launch checklist covers everything from launch strategy, information architecture, and content planning to mobile-first design, accessibility, semantic HTML, title tags and meta descriptions, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, structured data and FAQPage schema, Core Web Vitals, cross-browser QA, form testing, analytics and conversion tracking (GA4, Plausible, Fathom, Matomo), Search Console setup, cookie consent, privacy policy and imprint compliance, the DNS and SSL cutover, and post-launch monitoring. Compiled by Margus Veeber, Head of Web at Pipedrive, from 15+ years of launching and growing SaaS websites.